We analyse free-riding behaviour of Finnish municipalities prior to voluntary municipal mergers. The merger process creates a temporary common pool problem, because of a delay from the initial decision to the actual merger during which municipalities stay autonomous. Using a...

In the past decades many European countries implemented numerical fiscal rules in order to strengthen fiscal discipline on all levels of government. This development was intensified by the financial crisis in 2008. Although plenty of research points to the discipline-enhancing effect of these...

In federal countries, such as the U.S., the fiscal authority consists not of one, but many governments, with state governments accounting for a sizable share of expenditures. We analyze how state partisanship of politicians affects state fiscal policy and quantify the possible macroeconomic...

I study the effect of refugees' protection status on labor market outcomes focusing on a recent cohort of Syrian and Iraqi refugees entering Germany between 2013 and 2016. My empirical analysis exploits a sudden and unpredictable change in the assessment of the Federal Agency responsible for...